Wei, Joseph
W 4 :10 PM
Park Hall 0061
Race and Literary Institutions
This seminar introduces students to the study of race and US literary institutions. We’ll be focusing not only on individual authors, but also on the mediating role of literary institutions—e.g., publishers, agents, editors, literary nonprofits, prizes, and creative writing programs—in the making of “multiethnic American literature.” At the same time, we’ll also explore how minoritized writers have carved out alternative literary spaces and communities separate from white-dominated literary institutions from the early 20th century to the present: from little magazines in the Harlem Renaissance and early Asian American writing of the Popular Front era to Black Arts, Chicano, Native American, and Asian American literary movements of the 60s and 70s to the ongoing “multicultural” publishing boom today. Some questions we’ll consider: How have writers of color published and circulated their work? How have institutions changed the conditions of literary production for minority writers? Have writers of color become fully incorporated into the “mainstream” literary marketplace? And how have these writers organized alternative institutions to the ones that dominate contemporary publishing and literary production?
My hope is to get a good mix of critical and creative writing students, so we can hear from folks who’ve perhaps experienced these institutions firsthand. This course will also introduce graduate students to methods for investigating these “meso” level institutions and literary communities that have undergirded multiethnic American literature beyond textual analysis, including archival research, ethnography and oral history, cultural studies, sociology and literature, and digital humanities.